Testament

by Pam Crane

Love for the coal, the diamond and the tree;

  Love for all eyes, for star, for meteor-swarm -

  Glory be to God for all of Three.

  Let there be life for every loving thing,

  Life for the Light that out of Glory grew;

  Life for the Harmony my soul can sing -

  Glory be to God for all of Two.

  Let there be Fire for every holy heart,

  Fire understanding; Fire for duty done;

  Fire for the rapture of God's rejoining part -

  Glory be to God for All of One.

  Forward to Index

  ICHTHUS

  Help me - oh help me endure.

  One touch from your finger-tip, fierce glory,

  Is enough!

  All that is darkest in me rises to the surface

  Of my soul,

  That which is dross, impure

  Is borne up on the tide of my lanced love

  My Lord, my Jesus, for you take me whole

  To make the hopeless holy.

  You have harpooned your struggling fish, O Man-God,

  Master of Seas!

  It is your net I fear far more than your will's sword,

  Unvanquished Jesus!

  It is your net - the stifling shock of shoals hauled asunder,

  Outpoured as silver at your wounded feet;

  The terror and glory

  Is my drop lost already in your ocean.

  Forward to Index

  1Fishing

  ( A Double Etheree )

  On

  grey-blue

  Galilee

  a soft mist lies

  Our nets arc outward

  Fishing is poor today

  The wet mesh only lifts weed

  And we have a living to make

  Somehow. Andrew gasps, points to the prow -

  There stands Jesus, who had not come with us.

  “Cast to the other side,” he says. The mast

  Swings as we haul water-heavy net

  To starboard; we stagger righting

  The boat, every rope tightens,

  Each muscle taut, Peter

  Staring at Jesus -

  Then at the shoal -

  Then Jesus

  on the

  Sea

  Forward to Index

  JESU, WE LIFT OUR LIGHT TO THEE

  The child whose eyes are full of stars

  That burn the hills of broken cars,

  The man whose smile is like the sun,

  whose only wealth is everyone -

  Jesu, we lift our light to Thee

  To glorify their poverty.

  The girl as simple as the moon

  robbed of her innocence too soon;

  The mothers who are left to pray

  For sons and husbands locked away -

  Jesu, we lift our light to Thee

  To shine in their captivity.

  The bones upon the searing plain

  Too weak to reach for milk or grain;

  The hands that cry from fields of blood

  Dying in debris, war, and mud -

  Jesu, we lift our light to Thee

  To guide us to Eternity.

  Forward to Index

  PRAYER

  Give me my share of the power of the mountains

  And my part of the trees’ prayer.

  Give me the wind to quicken my feet

  And the birds to sing to.

  Let me remember roses

  And that rainbows begin in cloud,

  That the sky has wept oftener than I,

  And that tears may sleep in the quiet kiss of the grass.

  Give me the love of man,

  And fill it with light

  So that my heart is not weighed down with wings,

  But make it the gay feather on which I fly.

  Forward to Index

  PSALM

  Dear God, I touch the hem of your listening darkness

  with my heart;

  And my lips are filled with light.

  Clambering on the vanishing treads of prayer,

  Each thought's finger strains in outreach unto you;

  And it is wholly there, Mind close in for the strong force

  To fuse Mind Holy with lowlier mind;

  As a fine bead breaks of dew, runs at a water's touch,

  is lost in the pool.

  As a passion of wind and wave claps cloud

  and the soaring sea together

  Rapt in the silent eye of the vortex.

  O God, I am a moving stillness within you:

  But touch my need with the finest filament of your Will,

  Time is re-woven.

  Forward to Index

  THE COMING

  When you first came - your clarion sounded by a thousand fables -

  Nobody noticed you, hid in your own shadow,

  Nobody saw the Man behind the winding-sheet

  Who opened his arms wide and called to the children;

  Who opened his arms wide with a lovely smile

  And touched the amazing glass for all to see

  In the bending light your face...bare Love breaks through a fissure of time

  In which the heart, the Earth, and the Sun, stop.

  And the second time,

  You blew like pollen through a thousand hearts

  Lighting the grains of love into a flare;

  Striking like a match dry nerves, and in a running flame

  Catching the hands of the unprepared, of the unwary,

  Catching the hands of the dancers in delight

  And running with their messages of love

  All over the Universe.

  We are astonishment, we whose wide eyes were burnt open;

  Bursting like stars on the firmament of fear.

  The third Coming comes in a blue silence. Those

  Who have understood, bowing their melting eyes

  To the Infinite as the liquid Love of the Will of the Father

  Floods and flows over the last banks of our history,

  Floods and flows white as our burning blood,

  Yielding with utmost grace each heart to the Inconceivable

  As gaunt brothers tower in fear over a brief terrain

  And are taken, all, with the body of the world.

  And are faced, all, by the eyes of Christ in the blue silence

  Forward to Index

  THE PILGRIM KING

  Christ is your Creed, your high endeavour;

  He that is Love let none deny.

  You are the loved, without Him never -

  In shadow and sunlight standing by.

  Christ is your Truth, your God, your Saviour;

  Ye are no wiser than His Word.

  Dutiful be in all behaviour

  Unto that Song the soul has heard.

  No-one is lost; His dearest pleasure

  Is ever to be our homeward Guide,

  Gathering slowly all his treasure

  Of human hearts to the Angels’ side.

  Lord of our Joy, no tongue can praise you

  More than the Christed soul can sing!

  Beacon of Love in Heaven ablaze, You

  Reign in our hearts as the Pilgrim King.

  Forward to Index

  WALKING ON THE WATERS

  You walk among us, and we become

  Incandescent. Who are You?

  You are the Light of the world, our life's flame

  Opening bone and nail to reality.

  Our liquid lives run away from the last cry

  Cross-hatched with pain, melting into Your feet

  To bear You mutely as the waters bore You -

  All we can do, to make this Death complete

  Is haul our Tree down to the rising tide,

  The debris-ridden sea we call a soul.

  Back in the lovely desert of our lies

  The weight of it seared us, old and black as coal.

  Nothing behind us but the wastes of time,

/>   Nothing before us but the Saviour's face,

  Like mad men we float out on the Cross

  To enter You. In the dirtiest, holiest place.

  Forward to Index

  THE VIRGIN WINDOW

  A little child I do not know

  With a stone broke my window.

  The beautiful glass, all shattered and smashed

  Lay on the floor where it had crashed,

  Its jewelled colours alive no more -

  In fragments dead upon the floor.

  Mother Mary's gentle face

  Was cracked and holed in many a place.

  Her soft-draped cloak of heavenly blue

  That glowed like love when the sun shone through

  Was torn from the limbs of the Virgin Queen

  And there was a hole where her heart had been.

  The cruel stone lay there below.

  I picked it up and with sorrow

  Bluring my sight with tears unshed,

  My mind numbed and my heart like lead,

  Wearily over the glass I stepped,

  Sat down on a chair, and wept.

  (Written when I was thirteen.)

  Forward to Index

  NURSERY RHYME

  Jesus Christ is ours today,

  His Sun will shine on straight and gay!

  Leave the trivial, leave the smart

  And come to the Lover that’s in your heart.

  Come with a whoop or come with the gall,

  Come if you’re ill or you’re not at all.

  Up the ladder where angels fall -

  A Cup and Loaf will serve us all!

  Forward to Index

  BIG BANG

  One day which never existed,

  God

  in solitary rage surprised Himself with a Thought

  so unsustainable in the here-to-fore

  He cracked the unflawed sheer shimmer

  of Monad in Equilibrium,

  He broke Mind

  mirrored in all directions,

  He shivered Infinity

  and the incorporeal mighty Hand that held it,

  thus beginning seven days of Bad Luck

  as Time was born

  in the vortex.

  Being God,

  Resourceful, He stretched forth His other hand

  upon the vortex, with an opposite charge -

  And Said: LET THERE BE LIGHT, and There Was Light

  flashing from splinter to splinter, aeon to age;

  suns of a shattered hand blinked fire into and out of a myriad million dizzy reflections

  glinting Godhead back,

  curled time-shards

  reduplicating spin-drift, inkblot, starclot and coalsack -

  by which light a God could see His scattered parts

  And Being 

  God, He Said:

  LET THEM FLY

  Asunder upon the wind of

  My unparalleled Imagination,

  LET THEM SEED where a

  plus-minus meets in the heart of light

  a microcosmic god in the anti-mind, for this

  is Matter of Moment; let there be Life, therefore,

  so let there be Soul - let there be male, and female

  warring and mating; let there be holes for light to penetrate,

  dramatic poles, north and south in collision, upwards, down -

  as in My excess I find

  sorrow I cannot drown

  in the necessity

  for light to

  mend Me by,

  so will my Self,

  enantiomorphic

  twin of Me and

  friend

  be lover of that Light,

  his flesh a bandage for My fractured dignity

  for a seven-night.

  Till then,

  Let every action have its equal and opposite reaction.

  Let there be

  Polarity, pendulum, fractal, parabola

  And parity.

  Thus Spake God …

  … One Day that suddenly existed, as

  a myriad million fragments of Forever

  took their first lesson in strife and alchemy;

  towards which sex, war, succour, science and sainthood,

  the long, vain struggle to tie the strings of symphonies

  between grass and the galaxy, Caligula and Christ -

  So many poles of puzzlement, poor man-thing! -

  making itself slowly in God's other image,

  feet on a star, head in the coalsack.

  God forgot

  to make men like snails. Here it is Sunday lunch

  And still we have not mapped our route for the last afternoon

  of our life; the future winks only briefly at us

  out of the healing mirrors.

  Some are struggling

  To put their eyes out on stalks and see around corners

  of the inconceivable before the last trump

  is played, the last supper indigested and

  the disbelievable unMichaelangelic Hand

  reach forth to converge the silver trails

  of the slow, vulnerable, visionary sun

  housing the soul in helix.

  Here they come,

  a few at a time,

  the unrejected cells;

  a Miracle is made.

  The Wound

  closes.

  Thy Hand, O God

  may close the eyes of Time - but it is built of us!...

  We who have put out the cat may be most unwilling to

  put out the stars the cat and we have hunted our dreams by,

  may be discontent;

  may fidget with the smoothed fabric of Space,

  finger the substance of the Maker's Dream,

  flex the muscles of a new idea -

  Spring a surprise.

  Forward to Index

  On Astrology

  THE LATE, GREAT ...

  Jeff, John and Ron -

  All gone.

  Mayo, Addey and Davison.

  Charles Harvey and Charles Jayne;

  Al H. Morrison.

  The quiet teachers,

  The mercurial out-reachers,

  The wired-world explorers,

  Sacrificing self for us.

  Walker, Elliot, Woodruff

  Achieved enough

  And they are gone

  To the real

  With Jim, Howard, Neil -

  Lewis, Sasportas and Michelson.

  The men of presence,

  The laid-back and the intense,

  The spiritual mothers,

  The many unforgotten others.

  Rudhyar, Ruperti, Ebertin

  Have now been

  Where all is known

  And Moby Dick is, Johndro, Maurice Wemyss

  To whom we are dreams.

  Ingrid Lind. Ada and Ivy. Margaret Hone.

  Jacob, and Olivia, and Michel -

  Schwartz and Barclay and Gauquelin -

  Shine on where all is well

  With our wise-women and our starmen.

  Now we are the teachers,

  We are the out-reachers;

  They before, beside us, behind us

  Invisibly remind us.

  Forward to Index

  THE PRICE OF FAME

  You used to be my friend;

  Such is the price of fame,

  That partnership would end

  Once you had made your name.

  I found you at my door;

  I taught you all I knew.

  The glamour that you wore

  An amusing part of you.

  The showman and the mage

  Reached for the wheels of time,

  Spun them on every page,

  Made them your pantomime.

  Now here’s the photograph,

  That weekend in July

  When I made people laugh ...

  You never said Goodbye.

  And here’s the quarter-page,
<
br />   The store, the famous face;

  And here’s the West End stage;

  And Strictly in eighth place.

  Here’s the remark you made,

  Burned on a DVD,

  The moment you betrayed

  Your soul, to be rid of me:

  The stars that lit your way,

  All that I value dearly

  You still exploit for pay

  Yet were a hobby, merely.

  Once, you always swore

  Never to fail a friend,

  And now one heart is sore

  Which you refuse to mend.

  If I am to forgive,

  Leap from the turning wheel,

  Abort its narrative ...

  If we are both to heal,

  Deep in the heart of light

  My bitterness, my shame

  Must die, and I rewrite

  The price we pay for fame.

  Forward to Index

  Macrocosm in Microcosm …

  23 Senryu on Astrological Technique

  DRACONIC

  Core values. The Sun

  Counted from the Dragon's Head.

  Trunk of an old tree.

  Nodic arc - a fine

  Anagram of Draconic.

  And hears God ...!

  TROPICAL

  Character-building

  Light streams from the Equinox

  Nests, broken branches

  SIDEREAL

  The great scheme of things

  One small world set in the stars

  Tree in a landscape

  DWAD

  I behind the eye -

  On the twelfth step of Being

  Life enters and leaves

  HELIOCENTRIC

  Check for vital signs -

  Faults glare, gifts shine in God's Eye

  Hidden agendas

  REFLEXES

  Squaring the Circle

  Warp and weft of painted Light

  Flying your colours

  Q CHARTS

  My time - flying hands

  Turn up the deal of the day.

  You are my transit.

  X CHARTS

  Great expectations -

  My riches under your Dragon